Review: Magician – Raymond E Feist
Good evening everybody!
It’s Sunday night again, and many of us have the joys of going back to the daily grind tomorrow. On a slightly more positive note we’re not quite there yet, so let’s enjoy the time we have 🙂 I’m going to have a few posts coming up in the next few days, including my monthly profile of the books I intend to read; I have another review coming up after this for A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (I finished that this morning) and I’ll also be reviewing my TBR pile once again in the next few days… I hope you’ll stay tuned!
To the forest on the shore of the Kingdom of the Isles, the orphan Pug came to study with the master magician Kulgan. His courage won him a place at court and the heart of a lovely Princess, but he was ill at ease with normal wizardry. Yet his strange magic may save two worlds from dark beings who opened spacetime to renew the age-old battle between Order and Chaos.
My Thoughts…
I don’t know about any of you my fellow readers, but I have a habit of staying up past my bedtime when I am extremely close to finishing a book. Magician is the first (and largest book) of the Riftwar Saga trilogy, being 841 pages in itself whilst the remaining two books add up to this together. At approximately 11pm on Thursday night, I knew I had 60 pages left to read in order to finish this book, so I WAS going to finish this book. I packed up from the front room, made my lunch ready for work the next day and made myself ready to read the home stretch whilst sat in bed.
I finished reading this book, brushed my teeth and got into bed at 12:45am 🙂 It’s a good job I’m a night owl anyway – I don’t need much sleep. It was absolutely worth staying up late to finish.
I read Magician before a number of years ago, not long after I had started working full-time and I was still living with my parents. I bought the further two books in the trilogy after reading and enjoying it, and that was back in January 2014. I still haven’t read these yet and that is why I wanted to re-visit the first book and refresh myself before I tried to read these.
I get the sense that Magician was written with the potential to be a standalone book initially. It isn’t like most books in that it doesn’t leave with some cliffhanger to draw you on to the next one. Certainly, there are plenty of things that could be picked up, revisited and elaborated on if the fact it was going to be a series was in doubt at the time of writing. Equally if Raymond E. Feist had never got the chance to write nor I the chance to read the last two books of the series, it wouldn’t be the end of the world either. From my perspective, Magician could exist as a standalone book. I’m glad it’s not though…just saying.
The book begins with us learning about Pug, a small orphaned keep boy who is effectively raised by his best friend’s parents. Every boy progresses to manhood at the point of the Choosing, in which they are apprenticed to a variety of crafts. Pug finds himself apprenticed to the great Magician Kulgan, and is elevated into court as reward for a courageous feat to save one of the royal family.
Pug struggles to find his way in this new life, but all is about to be turned on its head when Pug and Tomas, his best friend, find a foreign ship smashed against the rocks near castle Crydee.
Kelewan is a distant world from Midkemia; its people having fled from the Enemy through a rift in time and space onto this world. The Tsuranuanni have a vastly different social system and live in the harsh conditions of the world they are forced to live on. They greatly value the precious metals available on Midkemia, and after discovering this world quite by accident, events lead to war spanning years as the Midkemian’s fight against these new invaders.
Yet Kelewan also has something that Midkemia is lacking; the knowledge Pug needs in order to train in the Greater Path of magic. In training to do so, he becomes the Master Magician he was destined to be.
If I have one criticism of the book, it’s that I found the part of Pug’s education in the higher arts to be very lacking. It was almost like the need for Pug to be educated was merely a stepping stone in order to carry on with the rest of the book so a couple of chapters were stuck in to acknowledge the fact. I would have liked to see more development here personally. I don’t feel that this detracts from the book at all, what is written is well done and flows nicely.
It’s a bit cliché if anything, but I don’t mind that so much once in a while.
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